WILL NANOTECHNOLOGY BRING ABOUT THE SOCIALIST PARADISE? I have a piece speculating on that in the new issue of Legal Affairs. You can read it on the web here. There’s also a piece on privacy in the same issue by Orin Kerr, and an interesting piece on the legal aspects of role-playing games, too.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH offers a survey of the Iranian freedom movement.

THE UNITED STATES IS REINING IN NGOS and some people aren’t very happy about it.

Given the often-destructive and usually-political nature of NGO behavior around the world, some adult supervision seems warranted. And outfits that tailor their agenda to ensure their “viability” in thugocracies can hardly complain about pushback.

I’d like to see some accountability, where at the moment there is little or none.

OVERLAWYERED IS NOW RUNNING MOVABLE TYPE. Same URL, though. No, it didn’t move from Blogger: Walter Olson was baking his HTML on clay tablets until today.

GEPHARDT UPDATE: Ernie the Attorney writes:

[P]redictably, we now are in the “explanatory phase” wherein the politician’s handlers provide information on what he really meant. Fortunately, the blogosphere is impervious to this sort of thing. Unfortunately, we can’t say the same thing for the traditional media. But then they’ve got smaller (but more entertaining) fish to fry.

Ain’t it the truth.

L’ETAT C’EST MOI:

PARIS, June 24 — France plans to strengthen its president’s immunity from criminal investigation and prosecution but create clearer guidelines for impeaching a head of state, Justice Minister Dominique Perben announced on Tuesday.

The reform would put into law the blanket immunity that the Constitutional Council granted to President Jacques Chirac in 1999 as an investigating magistrate sought to question him about alleged fraud cases during his 1977-1995 stint as Paris mayor.

It was announced two weeks after an investigating magistrate defied the public prosecutor and pledged to open an inquiry into charges of false billing for 14 million francs ($2.5 million) Chirac and his wife spent on food while at Paris city hall.

But of course.

COULTERGEIST? Ann Coulter will soon be blogging.

LOTS MORE ON IRAN FROM JEFF JARVIS: “Accusations of American backing actually have given courage to the demonstrators. Unlike the streets of Paris, Berlin or Berkeley, anti-Americanism is not fashionable in Tehran.”

CHAD IS TRYING THE OIL TRUST FUND IDEA, after a fashion:

More audacious is the route along which Chad’s oil money will flow. For the first time, a nation has agreed to surrender part of its sovereignty over how to spend the money earned by unlocking its oil wealth. Proceeds from Chad’s sale of oil from the first three fields — expected to exceed $100 million a year, nearly doubling the nation’s fiscal revenue — will travel a financial pipeline designed, and insisted upon, by the World Bank and other outsiders and monitored by a Chadian committee that includes Muslim and Christian religious figures and other community leaders. Their job is to ensure the money is spent on development projects such as schools, clinics and rural roads, and isn’t siphoned into secret overseas bank accounts, as happened in neighboring Nigeria, or funneled into civil wars, as in Angola and Sudan.

If it succeeds, the project — known officially as the Chad Cameroon Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project — could offer the world a blueprint for how multinational companies, aid groups and governments can join hands to beneficially exploit the mineral wealth of Iraq and other countries. It could also reverse the violent curse of oil money in Africa. In recent years, the GDP of some oil-rich nations has actually declined, amid bloodshed and corruption.

Weirdly, I got a couple of emails regarding yesterday’s post on the Iraqi oil-trust idea in which the writers accused me of statism. Huh? The point of the oil-trust idea is to take control of oil revenues away from the state.

UPDATE: Reader Ben Szobody emails:

What the WSJ report ignored was France and TotalFinaElf’s complicity in the country’s poverty, the leadership’s corruption and the stumbling blocks already encountered by Exxon in its drive to pipe oil from Chad.

There’s not an regular Chadian citizen, in the bush where I lived, who will take tea with a Frenchman — it was to my advantage to garble “la langue celeste,” at times. It’s because Chadian oil wells have long been drilled and capped and sat upon by France, while jerry-rigged president Deby sits in his mansion, purchased by our anti-nation-builders, of course. At least, this is what nearly any native on the street will tell you, and they believe it as firmly as they believe that their votes don’t count, come election time.

French fighter jets routinely fly over remote parts of the Chadian bush, where my American parents still live. Ask any hut-dwelling native, and he’ll explain: “l’huile!”

Reporters Thurow and Warren note that Elf pulled out of its partnership with Exxon abruptly, and without explanation. Later, Deby nearly derails the deal by siphoning away some of the early windfall for his own uses. Could it be the French, yet again protecting their black gold after realizing their bit role in the pipeline? No wonder the story sardonically describes Mr. Chevallier’s full-time job of “harass[ing] people day and night to get things done.”

If Exxon succeeds in getting oil out of there, and the World Bank forces the corrupt leaders to use the money properly, it will be despite the wishes of the French, whose contracts have lamely papered over the oppression and poverty in Chad for years.

Heh. Good.

GEPHARDT RESPONDS — well, via a spokesman quoted in ABC’s The Note:

Dick Gephardt knows the law. The president can not overturn a Supreme Court decision. That’s not what he said. He was simply expressing his commitment to diversity and his willingness to use the tools of his office to promote affirmative action programs to the fullest extent possible. It’s important to remember that Harry Truman used an executive order to integrate the military.

Yeah. But that’s certainly not what Gephardt was talking about. I don’t think I can improve on Eugene Volokh’s comments on this:

Harry Truman’s executive order was very important — but it had nothing to do with an attempt to overcome a contrary Supreme Court decision. It’s hard to see how it’s evidence that a President can successfully “overcome” Supreme Court decisions that prohibit things that he thinks are good. (The Court had ruled, 50 years earlier, that segregation was permissible, but it certainly didn’t say it was mandated, and Truman’s court order wasn’t remotely a response to that decision. In fact, by the date of Truman’s order, the Court had begun its path towards desegregation, see, e.g., Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) and Sipuel v. Oklahoma (1948), so Truman’s decision was actually quite consistent with the trend of Supreme Court decisions.)

Furthermore, Gephardt was speaking about the University of Michigan affirmative action case — a case involving a state university’s admissions policy. What Presidential executive order could have possibly “overcome” a decision upholding the policy?

More broadly, Gephardt said he’d “do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does.” I’m not trying to stick him with a too literal interpretation of the “any,” but I assume that he was at least saying he’d fight via executive order a broad range of the sorts of decisions that Democratic audiences would disfavor. So if the Court holds there’s no constitutional right to an abortion, he’d issue an executive order to — do what exactly? How would he overcome that “wrong thing the Supreme Court does” with an executive order? Or if the Court reverses Miranda, what precisely would he order? (He could of course order federal officials to follow the old rule, but federal law enforcement is a tiny fraction of all law enforcement.)

So it seems that, given the Gephardt office response, Gephardt’s statement was still wrong, though perhaps in a more traditional way: He was promising the audience something that he must have known he couldn’t possibly deliver (an “overcoming” by Presidential executive order, addressed to federal employees, of a hypothetical Supreme Court decision that held unconstitutional a state university policy).

I guess, then, the Gephardt response translates to “Gephardt’s not a constitutional ignoramus, or an incipient dictator. He’s just your standard-model lying politician!”

Woohoo! That gets my vote.

UPDATE: Yale Law professor Jack Balkin is pretty critical of Gephardt’s remarks, though he disagrees with Bryan Preston’s statement that they’re comparable to Trent Lott’s.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Another law professor reader, who prefers to be anonymous, sends this:

On Gephardt, the better comparison is not Trent Lott, but John Ashcroft.

If you care about civil liberties, you criticize both Gephardt and Ashcroft (as you do).

For those lefty bloggers who refuse to criticize Gephardt, I’ll just have to remember that when they criticize John Ashcroft, they wouldn’t be doing so if Ashcroft were a Democrat–that their own political bias is one of the things determining whom they consider OK to criticize.

Indeed.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Daniel Drezner weighs in: “I’m even more alarmed by Gephardt’s casual assumption that he knows more about constitutional law than the Supreme Court. Shudder.” And, sadly, this comment from a reader may be true:

The key difference between the Democrats handling of Gephardt’s statement and the Republican’s handling of the Trent Lott fiasco is that the Republicans were actually ashamed and embarassed by Senator Lott’s comments.

The Democrats are thrilled and encouraged by those of Rep. Gephardt.

Yeah. And as quite a few readers note, we’re not hearing any comments about the inherent illegitimacy of 5-4 decisions, today.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Dan Ward emails:

To my mind, you missed one of the most important parts of the Gephardt aide’s dismissal/backpedaling on the Executive Order stupidity. The aide’s quote started with: ‘ “The fact that this question comes from libertarian law professors should speak for itself,” spokesman Erik Smith wrote in an e-mail.’

Ah. Well. Obviously all libertarians are out of their minds and have no thoughts worth considering.

I’m a former anarcho-socialist and I’m still about as far from being a libertarian as you can be without being actively Communist. But come on. Dismissing someone’s question about your candidate’s recorded statements because you don’t like his political background is mental arteriosclerosis.

Mental arteriosclerosis is, unfortunately, the order of the day in the Democratic Party, which is why I am no longer — as I once was — a card-carrying member.

CHRISTIAN BLOGGERS ON HARRY POTTER: “Funny, 700+ links. Not one of them condeming anyone to hell for reading the book, though some concern with regards over seeking to find Biblical analogies and metaphors within this particular body of fiction.”

Not everyone, however, is as enlightened — something with which I have firsthand experience. But I survived unscathed. And I stand by my Elizabeth Montgomery / Melissa Joan Hart point.

UPDATE: Reader Mark Jones emails:

Two points on your argument that witches would all be babes.

1. Well, yeah, Elizabeth Montgomery and Melissa Joan Hart are definitely babes. And, yeah, if you have that kind of power why not be a babe?

2. On the other hand, Samantha Stevens had a lot of witchly relatives, many of whom where not–to put it charitably–babealicious. Maybe they were makinng fashion/political statements, but I dunno. I suspect the distribution of babes among witches (barring spells to change their appearance) is fairly normal.

Of course, I may be overthinking this just a tad.

Gee, do you think?

MORE ALGERIAN CONNECTIONS:

Italy’s financial police launched a major swoop against a group it said was close to the Islamic extremist al-Qaeda network in the north around Milan, arresting six people. . . .

The suspects are accused of giving logistical help to a cell of the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), a militant Islamic group waging a bloody civil war to overthrow the secular government in Algiers.

I keep harping on the Algerian connections, don’t I?

UPDATE: Reader Brian Reilly points out this story from 1999:

Five arrests made in Boston as part of bomb probe
By Catherine Ivey, Associated Press, 12/30/99
BOSTON – Five men, three of whom identified themselves as Algerian, were arrested Thursday by federal officials wanting to question them about their possible links to Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian arrested in Washington state on explosive smuggling charges.

He sends this link, to a related story, too:

Ghani told an associate he was angry that Ressam brought explosives to the United States, and also mentioned “that the situation was boiling in Algeria and that the United States and the CIA are running everything over there.” Algeria has been locked in a bloody civil war.

Despite the details of the arrest, Lewis Schiliro, head of the FBI in New York, acted to reassure New Yorkers as the new year approached.

“There are no specific and credible threats to any part of New York City or elsewhere and no explosives or explosive devices were found in connection with the investigation of Abdel Ghani,” he said.

There’s also this:

Government links Vermont, Washington border arrests

By Wilson Ring, Associated Press, 12/30/99

BURLINGTON, Vt. — Federal prosecutors today linked a Canadian woman arrested at a remote Vermont border crossing with an Algerian man taken into custody at the border in Washington state.

A prosecutor said in court documents that Lucia Garofalo and Ahmed Ressam were in the same cell of “a violent Algerian terrorist organization” known as GIA.

Amazing what you can learn on this Internet thingie.

NOW THIS IS INTERESTING:

Most Americans would support the United States taking military action to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons despite growing public concern about the mounting number of U.S. military casualties in the aftermath of the war with Iraq, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

People often ask me if the blogosphere really changes minds. And I don’t know. But it’s obvious that the marches and rhetoric of the antiwar movement, not to mention dozens of Paul Krugman columns, haven’t had much impact on public opinion.

ME, DAN QUAYLE, AND JUSTICE BRENNAN: All in the space law symposium from the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, which has now put its archives online.

JAMES CEASER OFFERS AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF ANTI-AMERICANISM.

ERNIE THE ATTORNEY ON DICK GEPHARDT’S LATEST: “When are these guys going to figure out that it isn’t just the lazy old media that is taking note of what they are saying?”

When, indeed?

Meanwhile Bryan Preston says that Gephardt’s remarks are worse than Trent Lott’s — Lott just wished that Strom Thurmand had succeeded in subverting the Constitution. Gephardt is promising to do it himself. And Preston is challenging Lefty bloggers to make an issue of this, as conservative bloggers did with Trent Lott.

So far they don’t seem to be rising to the challenge.

UPDATE: Bill Hobbs is also noting the silence from the left.

MORE NEWS FROM BAGHDAD:

BAGHDAD, Iraq – You can find just about anything at the Baab al Sharjee market in the center of Baghdad. Air conditioners, electric fans, radios, satellite dishes. And short videos that chronicle the torture chambers of Saddam Hussein.

One video – “Saddam’s Crimes and His Followers: Mukhabarat Torturing” – shows men lying on the ground as their legs are tied to a stick in the air. They writhe in pain as military officers whip the soles of their bare feet. Another shows a grenade being strapped to the chest of a blindfolded man. A few minutes later, he’s blown up.

“Thousands of people have bought them,” said Taha Adnan, 16, a vendor in the market.

The world long has known that Saddam used chemical weapons against the Kurds and brutally repressed Shiite Muslims, has known of his secret police and torture chambers. But until his regime disintegrated in the face of a U.S. onslaught, it seldom heard the cries of his victims or their survivors.

Now they are starting to tell their stories.

And they’re not very pretty stories.

THIS JUST IN: Jonah Goldberg is a muddle-brained Frenchman.

Funny, he doesn’t sound Frankish.

WHY YOU’D ALMOST THINK THEY WANTED TO KEEP THINGS CHAOTIC IN THE MIDEAST:

State Department and White House sources tell TIME the U.S. has lodged complaints that Paris is turning a blind eye to fund raising in France by front organizations for Hamas, the terrorist group that has claimed responsibility for most of the recent wave of suicide attacks. The U.S. also claims France is blocking European Union efforts to restrict these front groups elsewhere. “There’s a lot of intelligence to suggest that the French have become increasingly a conduit for funds to Hamas and that they’re just not taking the steps that are necessary,” says a State official. Some Administration hard-liners suspect the French of positioning themselves to influence the Arab-Israeli peace process by leveraging Hamas’ European funding.

It can’t actually be true that the French are backing the bad guys everywhere, can it? Because it sure seems that way.

BOY, THAT WAS A QUICK CHANGE: Now Bill O’Reilly is praising the Internet, and (well, sort of) suggesting that news anchors should start weblogs.

PETER LEWIS WRITES on the Supreme Court’s library internet filtering decision:

Sure, some kids will use the Internet to search for porn, just as they’ll snoop for dad’s collection of Playboys out in the garage. I suspect that if they are blocked on the library computers, they’ll simply use someone else’s computer. (Or, they’ll hack around the software.) Meanwhile, everyone else at the library wanting to use the Internet will be assumed to be a pervert, especially those who ask that the software filters be disabled.

Another issue: Whose filter will the libraries use? The software has to be compiled by someone whose value judgments are trustworthy.

Indeed. But the real lesson is that librarians who don’t like being bossed around by the feds should think twice about accepting federal money, which always comes with strings.

THE NEW YORK TIMES’ BILL BORDERS responds to a critic. Rather lamely.

EUGENE VOLOKH BLOGS A BIZARRE QUOTE FROM DICK GEPHARDT about overturning the Supreme Court via Executive Order. I saw the Fox story that Eugene links and decided — as he suspects — that it had to be a misquote. But CNN has it, too. Here it is:

When I’m president, we’ll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day.

I agree with Eugene that if Gephardt meant this as written he has no business running for President — but I still find it hard to believe that Gephardt would say something so dumb.

UPDATE: Eugene now has a link to the C-SPAN video and at about 45:40 Gephardt says exactly what’s quoted up above, and the context is exactly as represented. Sheesh. That’s absolutely pathetic. Either (1) Gephardt, despite all his years in Congress, has still failed to learn that you can’t overturn a Constitutional decision by the Supreme Court with an executive order; or (2) Gephardt was in Full Pander Mode and hoped his audience wouldn’t know better. Neither speaks very well for him.

FACT-CHECKING MORT ZUCKERMAN: Howard Kurtz points out that some of those frivolous lawsuit stories are, well, not true.

The real problem, in my opinion, isn’t garden-variety frivolous lawsuits, but the use of the tort system to end-run the regulatory process, as in tobacco — and as has been attempted with firearms and fast food. Doing that is an effort by people in the government to subcontract the legislation process to private interests, without democratic safeguards. I think it is unfortunate that people have been distracted from this concern by bogus stories of slip-and-fall chicanery.

Plus: Orrin Hatch apologizes! But for the wrong thing.

NOW THIS IS INTERESTING:

Saad al-Faqih, head of the London-based Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia and critic of the Saudi royal family, was admitted to hospital on Sunday with a leg wound, a Scotland Yard spokesman said.

Mr al-Faqih told the BBC that two men claiming to be plumbers knocked on his door and then forced their way into his home.

He said he had received recent warnings of a plan to abduct or kill him.

The BBC is spelling his name differently, for some reason, but he’s been in the press previously as Saad Al Fagih and he’s a “Saudi dissident” in the same way that Osama bin Laden is a Saudi “dissident” — seemingly exactly the same way, as this story from last year indicates:

Osama Bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, has connections to a leading Saudi dissident based in London, BBC Radio’s Five Live Report has revealed.

The programme provides evidence that Saad Al-Fagih, a key figure in the London-based campaign opposed to the Saudi regime, bought a satellite phone that was later used by Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organisation.

On 30 July 1998 one of the suicide bombers who blew up the US embassy in Nairobi telephoned the satellite phone number: 00 873 682 505 331.

Eight days later the suicide bombers struck in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam killing 247 people.

The satellite phone was the very same one that had been bought by Saad Al-Fagih in November 1996.

So who was behind this attack? Was it real, or staged? I don’t know, but stay tuned. A British reader suggests a connection with this arrest in London, but I have no idea whether that’s the case. It does seem, however, as if things continue to be active on the Al Qaeda “Saudi dissident” front.